Charles Ambrose Storey was the first Trustee to be appointed after the death of E. G. Browne in January 1926 and attended his first meeting the same year, together with H. A. R. Gibb, appointed at the same time. Storey was then Assistant Librarian to the India Office. He was born in Blackhill, Co. Durham on 21 August 1888, elder son of the local vicar, and educated at Rossall School (Lancashire). In 1908 Storey went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Major Scholar and had a brilliant academic career, achieving first-class honours first in Classics, awarded the Porson Prize for translating English poetry into Greek. He graduated in 1912 with a Distinction in Oriental Languages (Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic), carrying off several Hebrew prizes, and became Tyrwhitt Scholar in Hebrew in 1914. But in the same year he was appointed Professor of Arabic at the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College (now the Muslim University) of Aligarh, India, where he published a text edition of Mufaddal b. Salama's al-Fakhir, a ninth-century Arabic treatise on the popular proverbs and colloquial expressions of the Arabs. This was based on his PhD thesis, supervised by A. A. Bevan and examined by E. G. Browne and R. A. Nicholson, who were thus more than usually aware of his academic credentials. Storey describes himself on the title page as ‘formerly scholar of Trinity College and Allen Scholar (1913) in the University of Cambridge’. He dedicated the work ‘to my father’.

He left Aligarh in 1919 for the India Office in London. By the time he was promoted to Librarian, in 1927, he had published the first part of what was to become his life-time's work and claim to fame, on Persian literature. He went on to complete a continuation of the catalogue of the India Office library's Arabic manuscripts; both of these early works concerned Qur’anic literature.

Storey left the India Office in 1933, having been elected Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge on the retirement of R. A. Nicholson, and spent the rest of his career devoted to the Bio-Bibliographical Survey of Persian Literature.